Booty Bones: A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery

by Carolyn Haines

“I believe at one time it was. And I think your father figured this out. He believed it was real, and whoever killed him did, too.”

  “Then whoever killed him likely took the treasure already.” Tinkie was the pragmatist in the group.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “If that were the case, no one would be messing with Angela now. She wouldn’t be a threat. There would have been no need to send Wofford to prison or kill your father.”

  “You really believe there is a treasure and we might find it?” Angela asked.

  “I do.” I dared a look at Tinkie.

  “Me too,” she said. “At first I thought it was a bunch of malarkey, but after all of this, there has to be a solid motivation behind the actions. Money is always a good place to start.”

  “Dad wasn’t the kind of man people wanted to hurt. It has to be money.” Angela slumped down onto the steps. “I would give all of it away for a week with my father.”

  Tinkie sat beside her and patted her back. She was always the first one to offer sympathy or comfort, but Angela’s words pierced my heart. I knew exactly how she felt.

  As we sat in the galley, a strange calm settled over the boat.

  “It’s the eye. Let’s get on land.” Angela reached up and opened the hatch. For the first time in what seemed an eternity, there was no rain. And no wind. We inched up onto the deck.

  The sky was leaden, and the clouds roiled, but we were in the midst of an eerie calm. No seagulls cried for scraps, and the normal sounds of motorboats pulling in and taking off were gone. It was as if all living creatures had been wiped from the planet.

  “How long will the eye be over us?” Tinkie was the last out of the hatch, and she looked around with distrust.

  “The eye was very small. It’s not a big window of time. Let’s jump to the deck and get out of here.”

  “Good plan.” I scanned the dock. Tinkie’s red car was easy to spot now that the torrential rains had stopped. There was no sign of my dog and cat, though.

  “I’ll jump first and pull the boat closer to the pier,” Angela offered.

  She was about to act on her words when we saw two people coming down the pier toward us. It took a moment to recognize Arley and the sheriff. I clutched Tinkie’s shoulder. We both grabbed Angela before she could make the jump.

  “Where’s the spyglass?” Benson called out to us. “I think you’ll want to give it to me.”

  “Why should we?” I had a lot of bravado, which vaporized when he pulled the gun from Arley’s back and pointed it at us.

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot Arley first and then you. Maybe in the leg, if my aim is good. Maybe in the heart. I only need one of you alive to tell me where to find that damn telescope. I’ve spent way too much effort trying to recover it.”

  “There’s no treasure,” Tinkie said. “It was a story John Trotter told everyone. It isn’t true.”

  “I’ll say one thing for you ladies. You don’t give up easily. There is a treasure. John knew it, and I know it. John couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and he told too many people how he had found the treasure and was on the verge of bringing it up. He’d made arrangements with a salvage company to haul it from the bottom. All he needed to find the exact location was that damn telescope. Now where is it? I’m not going to ask again. I’m just going to start shooting. Arley here will be the first.”

  “Angela, give it to him. He will hurt you.” Arley didn’t attempt to move as he spoke. “Benson, you’ll never get by with this. Why are you even doing it? Everyone on the island knows this was John’s treasure. If you try to claim it, folks are going to start asking a lot of questions you don’t want to answer.”

  “Shut up.” Benson struck the side of Arley’s head with the gun barrel and sent him sprawling to the pier. “I don’t need you interfering and I don’t have time to play. Chavis is trying to get off the island on foot and I need to round him up.” He pointed the weapon at Tinkie. “The stolen item. Now.”

  Angela slowly withdrew the spyglass from beneath her jacket. “You mean this?”

  “Bring it over here.” Benson cocked the gun. “Stop clowning around, Angela. I’ll shoot these women and claim self-defense. Everyone believes me. I’m the sheriff.”

  “I don’t care about the treasure. You can have the telescope. Just free Larry Wofford. He didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Beyond my control.” Benson’s patience was about to snap. “You’re not in a position to bargain, Angela. You’re a smart woman. Smarter than your father, I hope.”

  His words cut through me. “You killed John Trotter.” I walked toward the deck railing, putting myself between Benson and Tinkie. “Why?”

  “John found the treasure.”

  “And he wouldn’t share?”

  Benson looked at me as if I’d grown a second head. “John wouldn’t let it go. He simply couldn’t understand how finding the treasure would be the worst thing that ever happened.”

  “What in the world are you saying?” Tinkie stepped out from behind me. “You don’t want the treasure, but you killed a man over it?”

  The sound of a motorboat made us all pause. Phyllis Norris cut through the rough water as she aimed the powerful sea-lab craft toward us. “Turn back! Turn back!” I tried to signal her away, but she didn’t understand what I was doing. She kept heading straight for us.

  “Phyllis! Turn away!” Angela waved her arms frantically, but the biologist kept coming.

  Phyllis angled the boat alongside the pier and tossed a line to the sheriff. He caught it and deftly tied off her boat. She nimbly jumped to the wooden dock. If she noticed the gun in Benson’s hand, it didn’t register.

  “Let her go,” Angela said. She turned to Phyllis. “You need to take your boat and get out of here. The eye will pass shortly, and the weather will be too rough. You shouldn’t be out on the water.”

  Arley saw an opportunity and jumped to his feet. He took a swing at Benson and caught the sheriff on the jaw, but it was a glancing blow. Benson used the gun as a club. The blow he struck on Arley’s head took him to the deck. He crumpled in a heap, and this time there was no doubt he was out cold.

  Almost as if the sky rebelled, thunder ripped, and a jagged fork of lightning shattered the gray horizon.

  Phyllis stared at Angela as if she spoke a foreign language. She turned to the sheriff. “I told you she hadn’t figured it out.” Anger colored her words. “Now we have a confrontation for no good reason. We could have stolen the spyglass back. But no, you had to muck everything up. And I didn’t see a sign of Chavis. He’s still on the island somewhere.”

  She stepped behind him. “Get the spyglass and kill them.”

  “What?” Angela started to jump from the boat to the pier, but the sheriff waved the gun.

  “Stay back,” he ordered. With his free hand, he grabbed Norris’s shoulder. “We don’t have to kill them.”

  “Of course we do. I told you Angela would never give up. Never. Once she believed Larry was innocent, she wasn’t going to rest until her father’s killer was put away.” She turned to us. “Well, here I am. And it’s too late. You won’t be around to exact revenge.”

  “You killed Dad? Why?” Angela asked.

  “He found the treasure. He left me no choice.”

  Angela was like a deflated balloon. “Why did you kill him? He loved you. He talked about you all the time and how much he wanted to provide for you, what he would do when he found the treasure. Why?”

  “The worst thing that could happen to me and this island would be for the treasure to be found. The ecosystem is strained to the breaking point. Can you imagine the hordes that would show up if a pirate’s treasure was truly found? The development, the treasure hunts in the Gulf, the carnival rides, the restaurants, the nasty, polluting humans who would be here year-round clutching for some scrap of pirate’s gold with their greedy hands? This was John’s vision of the future. He wanted to bring tourism to the island. He thought it would afford a better lifes
tyle for some people.”

  We were in serious trouble. She was crazy as a betsy bug on hot asphalt.

  “Shoot them, Osage. Then untie the boat and let the storm take it. We’ll destroy that damn spyglass and be free of the Esmeralda treasure forever. You and I will save paradise.” She shook free of him and started to walk away, but he grasped her hand.

  “Phyllis, let’s think this through. If the bodies are recovered with bullet wounds, folks won’t let this go. We got lucky with Trotter and Wofford. Two private investigators and Angela on top of that greedy bastard Renault and his conniving sister. It’s too much.”

  Phyllis stopped and reversed. She looked at the three of us on the deck of the Miss Adventure. “Untie the boat. The eye is passing. Let the storm take them out. They’ll drown.”

  “We tried that once and—”

  “We’ll make sure they aren’t rescued this time.” Phyllis pointed to one of the ropes. “Hurry. If Arley wasn’t so big, we’d put him on the boat, too. We’ll have to figure another means of disposal for him. We’ll put him on the boat with that stupid bitch Lydia. We can make it look like they shot each other.”

  The sheriff bent to free the boat from the dock ties we’d worked so hard to establish.

  “Don’t do this,” I said to him. “She’s making you a murderer.”

  “We’ve gone too far down a long road for me to turn back now.” Benson had one line free and moved to the next one. “This island is everything to her, and she’s everything to me. I never had a chance when John was alive. Now, though, she needs me. I can’t stop. We have to protect the environment.”

  “This is crazy.” Tinkie leaned over the rail. “You’ll get caught. So far, you haven’t done anything. Sheriff, you’ve been in office twenty years. You’re going to throw that away and end up in prison.”

  “That won’t happen. As primary law enforcement official of this area, I’ll make sure your deaths are listed as a tragic accident. Victims of the storm. Three foolish women who failed to heed warnings, take precautions, and who attempted to sail a vessel into the teeth of a hurricane. You thought you could get to the nonexistent pirate’s treasure before the hurricane struck. Tragic, but no one’s fault.”

  He could sell fireballs in hell.

  “Don’t you want the spyglass?” Angela held it out, bait for a hungry shark.

  Phyllis stepped forward. “Good try, Angela. We never wanted the telescope. Don’t you get it? We don’t want the treasure to be found. It was never about taking the treasure, it was about keeping it from being discovered.”

  Tinkie leaned over to me. “That woman is bat-shit crazy. And the sheriff isn’t far behind her.”

  I only nodded. But Benson was a crazy man with a gun in one hand and the rope that tied us off to the safety of the dock in the other.

  “Phyllis!” I yelled after the biologist. “Phyllis, we can work this out. Angela doesn’t care about the treasure. She only wants to free Wofford.”

  “And how would she manage that without sending me to prison? Not really an option from where I’m standing.” She put a hand on the sheriff’s arm and squeezed. “Set them adrift. We’ve got about five minutes before the eye wall passes over us and the back end of the storm kicks in.”

  “Sheriff, if you set us adrift, that’s tantamount to murder.” Benson was guilty of a dozen legal infractions, but he hadn’t killed John Trotter. Now he was colluding in a triple homicide. “Retrieve the treasure in secrecy. No one has to know about it. We know where it is, and if you let us live, we’ll tell you. Millions in Spanish gold and jewels. You can have all of it. It can be recovered without fanfare, and you can use the money to protect the island.”

  The wind gusted and swung the bow of the boat toward the dock. Benson had freed one tie-line. We only had two left—and those not for long.

  The winds picked up, and lightning fractured the heavy sky. Any minute, the clouds would open up and visibility would be cut to zero. If the Miss Adventure was freed from her mooring, we would either be smashed against the pier or pulled out into the vortex of the storm. I didn’t have much sailing experience, but I had enough to be terrified.

  “You don’t get it.” Phyllis loosened another mooring. “Forget about trying to bribe Osage with the treasure. Take that damned spyglass to the deepest part of the ocean where it belongs. And you go with it.” She cast the line free.

  The Miss Adventure swung broadside into the growing swells. We were in serious, serious trouble.

  “This is not looking good for the ladies of detection,” Tinkie said softly.

  “You are a brilliant master of the understatement.”

  “We should jump in the water and swim for shore.” Angela walked to the rail and leaned over.

  A bullet exploded only inches from her hand. When I looked back at the pier, Phyllis had the sheriff’s gun. “Don’t try it. If you jump, we’ll shoot you in the water. Chances are better than fifty percent that the storm will pull you out for shark chum, and I’m willing to risk it to be rid of you all. Your best chance is to ride the storm out in open water.”

  And that was no chance at all. “She wants the storm to kill us. That way she and the sheriff can pass off our deaths as accidental or any way they wish.”

  The first pattering of a gentle rain began. Our window of time was closing fast. Phyllis aimed for the final tie-line.

  “When I get back on dry land, I’m going to snatch that bitch bald-headed,” Tinkie said, and she wasn’t understating her intentions. She was petite, but she was scrappy.

  “That makes two of us. I was a fool not to realize how precious the environment was to her. She said it over and over again. I never considered she’d kill the man she was seeing.”

  “You think you’re feeling like a patsy. She fed me information to stop Roundtree’s development,” Angela said. “I should have known. She killed my father because he finally realized his dream.”

  Tinkie put her hands on her hips. “She’ll pay.”

  “Right. We can haunt her from our watery grave.” Angela was exhausted.

  “Phyllis! Don’t do this.” I tried one more time.

  Her response was to bend to the task of freeing the last line. The knot defied her, and she began to tear at it. Thunder roared, and a blur of red, gray, and white zoomed down the pier and knocked Phyllis flat. She gave a tiny cry as the wind was knocked from her lungs.

  With a deep growl, Sweetie Pie grabbed her raincoat and dragged her to the edge of the pier. Just as my dog was about to push her off, Benson regained his wits and went after Sweetie.

  Never in a rush, Pluto arrived on the scene. He jumped on Benson’s ass and dug in with all four claws. Watching Benson buck and whirl was amusing, but my focus was on the tie-line. Inch by inch it came unwound from the dock. With every swell the Miss Adventure rode, she slowly freed herself, moving away from land and into the open water and the rapidly approaching storm.

  The rain increased.

  “What should we do?” Tinkie asked. She, too, saw the inevitable.

  “What can we do?” I asked.

  With a splash, Sweetie nudged Phyllis off the pier and into the water.

  “Phyllis! Wait!” Benson plunged in after her. Pluto leaped to safety just in time.

  “Sweetie, get the rope!” I feared she wouldn’t understand, but once again I underestimated my dog. She grabbed the end of the rope, which was thankfully still wrapped around the piling, and braced herself to hold the boat from slipping free of all moorings.

  “Let’s jump in the water before it gets any rougher,” Tinkie said. “We can make it to shore.”

  “If the boat shifts in the wind and current, we could be crushed.”

  “If we stay on board this boat, we could end up in the Bermuda Triangle. How does that work out for ships?” Tinkie was fed up with inaction.

  I ignored Tinkie’s sarcasm and focused on the more immediate problem. “Sweetie can’t hold us much longer.” She fought with every fiber
of strength, but the tide and wind were pulling her down the pier.

  “You should have taught her how to tie knots,” Tinkie said. “As soon as we’re back in Zinnia, I’m going to start a class for her and Chablis. Tying and untying knots is a good thing for a PI dog to know.”

  She was rambling because she was as scared as I was.

  Sweetie was at the end of her rope, literally, and the distance from deck to dock had increased by twenty feet. The storm was sucking us out.

  “I’m going to start the motor, and we can set the sails and try to run parallel to the coast. Since this is the back end, the winds may assist us.” Angela had finally settled on a plan. “We’ll head west, out of the storm. Let’s get busy.”

  She disappeared into the wheelhouse. I looked at Tinkie. “Do you know how to set the sails?”

  “No, but we better learn quickly.” She went to the mast and began to untie the sail. “If we angle into the wind wrong, we’re dead.”

  Even as she spoke, the boat was snatched by wind and water, and Sweetie was pulled to the edge of the pier.

  “Let go!” I had to make her give it up. She couldn’t save us. She was just an eighty-pound dog trying to hold a sailboat. But she would die trying. “Sweetie! Let go!”

  And then the rain unleashed. The back end of the storm hit us hard.

  “Shit.” Tinkie stumbled into me, blinded by the onslaught of water. “I’ve ruined my freaking manicure. Not to mention my hairdo. I’m going to look like crap for the Black and Orange Ball.”

  My friend was not shallow. She was brave. She was not worried about a stupid ball, but if she pretended hard enough that the ball was our biggest future concern, maybe we wouldn’t turn into gibbering idiots from terror.

  “Don’t give up yet,” I said to her. “Don’t quit.” Words to live by. Or die by.

  We struggled with the sail, and I prayed Sweetie had let us go. The rain eased a bit, and I looked to see if Sweetie and Pluto had left the pier. To my surprise, a dark-haired man ran toward my dog.

  “Tinkie! Look!”

  She swung around to the pier, and her breath escaped in a gasp. “It’s Graf.”